Thanks for your response, but it was still just kind of painting him negatively with a broad stroke, and saying he's not what you hoped he would have become, thats too bad, but I can't fault a person for not rising to others expectations of them. Maybe his followers were expecting too much and when he didn't deliver they turned on him.
As far as you saying that you were hoping he would have created another purer more original type of ISKCON, I would hope not. ISKCON has always been a mixed bag, I would certainly not like to see anything like it at any stage of it's existence come into fruition again.
You said:
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build an organization that would rival ISKCON, and bring Prabhupada’s vision back to its original purity and intent.
Bhaktivedanta's vision was the problem and would cetainly would not be the solution. He created a sexless, misogynistic, militaristic, hierarchical mess.
If he had just stuck to the theology then that would have been fine, he is an expert on the theology. But he added things into the original teachings which were the root cause for all of the problems of ISKCON. It was always dysfunctional and a souless, sexist, socially awkward, unpleasent place to be. I am always surprised when I hear ex members speak of the "original" ISKCON as if it was any different then after Bhaktivedanta left. In both cases Bhaktivedanta did not run the society, others did, he only ran it at the very beginning. Not that it would have mattered too much if he had ran it or not, it would have been more genteel if he did, but still dysfunctinal. The same dysfunctionality was going on then as now, the same abuses of power, the same sexism, the same demand on total celibacy, the same fear and loathing of women being taught, the same insistence on giving up all and any activity which was not directly serving the society or else be asked to leave, the same demand to get up every single morning and be in the temple by 4:30 a.m or be asked to leave etc. It was always a bizarre combination of spirituality and sexless draconian totalitarianism. That's spirituality? Not quite.
So when people speak of the golden age of ISKCON I just shake my head and think "don't they see it's just a romanticized version of what really went down, that they are imagining it to be bteer then it was. They were converts to a new religion and had the fervor of the new convert, that is why they remember that time as being so special, the feeling of discovering something new and exciting, discovering god, but the reality is that it was not better then it is today, it was always a very disturbing place to live."
It was Bhaktivedanta who created the mess, it was his shaping of the dysfunctional social dynamic, it was his shaping of an authoritarian organization, it was his teaching on women being inferior and dangerous, it was his teaching that sex is inherently bad and displeases god, it was his teaching that you cannot do anything other then serve the society with every second of your time, no movies, no travelling, no anything at all accept serve the leaders, he taught that, he created that. He was the one who instilled fear into the minds of his followers that if they left his society which demanded total slavery that they may "rot in the material world for millions of lifetimes", those are his words, that was his message, tell me it isn't.
Sorry Sabino, I know that Bhaktivedanta was a great scholar of the theology, a great theologian, but he was much more then that, and he brought that much moreness and created a new religion, his teachings are a mixture of the real tradition and bunch of craziness. If he would have stuck to the tradition without adding all the negativity, all the fear mongering, all the totalitariansim, the authoritarianism, etc. Then it would have been really a good thing, not just a romanticized false memory of when you were young and exicited and naive.
It was